Albania 2035: Children, Learning and Social Cohesion in a Changing Society

Albania 2035: Children, Learning and Social Cohesion in a Changing Society. A Strategic Foresight Case This strategic foresight case explores what childhood, learning and the transition to adulthood could look like in Albania in 2035. It also asks which policy decisions taken today would sustain an equitable, resilient and inclusive education and social-protection system across several plausible futures. Albania is shrinking, ageing and diversifying at the same time. Between the 2011 and 2023 censuses its resident population fell by about 420,000. Annual births dropped from roughly 35,700 in 2014 to 21,425 in 2025, and pre-university enrolment declined by around 17 per cent in six years. Meanwhile the country has begun to attract foreign labour. Learning outcomes fell sharply in PISA 2022, and more than one child in four lives at risk of poverty. The study applies a child-rights and equity lens through a structured foresight sequence: a horizon scan of 25 signals across six structural drivers, each rated for evidence, maturity, uncertainty, impact on children and policy implication; an impact–uncertainty prioritisation; a 2×2 scenario matrix built on institutional adaptive capacity and the pace of economic and technological transformation, which yields four futures: Albania Accelerates, Two-Speed Albania, Protected but Stagnant, and The Hollowing Out; child vignettes that translate each scenario into lived experience; wind-tunnelling of eleven policy options; backcasting to decisions required in 2026; a monitoring framework for emerging inequalities. The case builds on the author's doctoral research on socio-economic status and educational outcomes in Albania (University of Tirana, 2021; DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20801424) and related published work on education equity. Main findings: Language may become a new axis of educational inequality if labour immigration evolves into family settlement. The most robust policies concern people and information rather than technology: teacher development, Albanian-as-an-additional-language capacity, and equity measurement disaggregated by language, migration and digital access. National-scale AI tutoring is contingent on prior investment in access and safeguards. Social protection must be redesigned for a mobile population. Keywords: strategic foresight; scenario planning; Albania; education equity; child rights; migration; multilingual education; artificial intelligence in education; social protection; PISA; demographic change; anticipatory governance